[rockdoc123]

Well I guess the bottom line is that whereas they did not put gas in their drinking water neither did any oil company (nobody is injecting gas here) so they only have nature or god to blame. If somehow a company had connected a separate gas reservoir to their acquirer then that is a different story but that does not seem to be the claim. I think their insurance requires that they vent the gas immediately. I know that if you report a gas leak in Alberta to the regulator the first thing they do is tell you to leave the house immediately and they send an emergency response team who will not leave until the issue is solved. This is what is perplexing but it could be there are different rules and regs with respect to gas leaks from lines versus the same from water wells.
The 88 ppm number has me scratching my head. You can detect much, much lower levels of H2S by smell so claiming they lived and showered in this for 5 years without knowing seems odd. As well that level of H2S I believe can render an individual unconcess in about 15 minutes (don't quote me on that as I'm trying to remember what the guidelines are for sour gas respirator kit on well sites).
It seems to me that rather than spend all this time, money and effort on trying to prove culpability of an oil company they would have been better off to vent and filter in a settling tank or cement and drill a new water well to a different acquirer.

[WildRose]

The people were told to vent the gas in order to prevent an explosion in their home, but according to the ERCB's regulations it is illegal to vent sour gas. So what should they have done?

The 88.5 ppm of sour gas found in their water at that particular testing may not have been at that high a level on all testings. It does say elsewhere in the testimony, though, that after that particular test was done, the person who took the sample wrote in his/her report that the water smelled awful that day. And, two years earlier, a sampling was done by the ERCB in which the people who took the sample joked with the complainant that their water "could be used to kill gophers, painless, they wouldn't know what hit them". On a later occasion, that same ERCB expert tested their water again and claimed that he did not remember smelling any gas in their water previously.

From an H2S safety factsheet:

"Hydrogen sulfide has a very low odor threshold, with its smell being easily perceptible at concentrations well below 1 part per million (ppm) in air. The odor increases as the gas becomes more concentrated, with the strong rotten egg smell recognisable up to 30 ppm. Above this level, the gas is reported to have a sickeningly sweet odor up to around 100 ppm. However, at concentrations above 100 ppm, a person's ability to detect the gas is affected by rapid temporary paralysis of the olfactory nerves in the nose, leading to a loss of the sense of smell. This means that the gas can be present at dangerously high concentrations, with no perceivable odor. Prolonged exposure to lower concentrations can also result in similar effects of olfactory fatigue. This unusual property of hydrogen sulfide makes it extremely dangerous to rely totally on the sense of smell to warn of the presence of the gas."

So, higher levels of H2S can render a person's sense of smell ineffective at detecting the gas, and exposure over an extended period of time at lower concentrations can have similar effects, therefore one can't rely on sense of smell to determine whether the level of H2S present is dangerous or not.

http://www.safetydirectory.com/hazardou ... _sheet.htm

This case has a rotten smell to it.

[rockdoc123]

Again it is not illegal to vent off gas from a water well no matter what the H2S content. It falls way below the Ercb emission guidelines for critical sour gas which was put in place for gas wells which have H2S content above 20%.

And the point at which you quit smelling H2S is the point at which you are just about unconscious. This is why in Alta seismic crews in certain areas are required to wear H2S detection tags. The point at which the ppm are high enough you can't smell it results in respiratory paralysis. If they have had low ppm of H2S for years then they would have had a continuous smell. if they had levels of H2S so high they couldn't have smelled it they would be dead.
What do you think people did decades ago when they ended up with gas traces in their water wells ( and this is a well documented occurrence amongst farmers and ranchers in Alta )? They drilled another well to a different level so they got sweet water.
I wonder if part of the problem here is city slickers moving to the country and expecting problem free access to water.

[WildRose]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '
')
And the point at which you quit smelling H2S is the point at which you are just about unconscious. This is why in Alta seismic crews in certain areas are required to wear H2S detection tags. The point at which the ppm are high enough you can't smell it results in respiratory paralysis. If they have had low ppm of H2S for years then they would have had a continuous smell. if they had levels of H2S so high they couldn't have smelled it they would be dead.

[rockdoc123]

the issue is that the horizontal wells drilled for shale gas are in most cases thousands of metres below any known water well acquirer. Vertical fracs reach a maximum of slightly greater than 100 m from the horizontal well bore and there are usually two stages of casing and cement between that shale horizon where injection is happening and the acquirer zone. There are already very stringent requirements on operators regarding completion of these wells in Alta with plans and results having to be filed with the ERCB. Such requirements are not in place in most states however. What I'm saying is the notion that fracing is creating all sorts of water issues has been demonstrated in almost all cases to be incorrect (I believe there are two outstanding cases in Pennsylvania where the discussion still ensues).

As to my last statement the folks who settled the west drilled water wells and never expected that they would either continue to flow or not become contaminated at some point. It is part of the general up keep and maintenance you need to accept if you live in the country without services. If you think it is reasonable to expect that you will drill a water well and it will produce for ever without problems of some kind then I think you are likely better off staying in the city and fighting it out with the zombie hoards.

[WildRose]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '
')As to my last statement the folks who settled the west drilled water wells and never expected that they would either continue to flow or not become contaminated at some point. It is part of the general up keep and maintenance you need to accept if you live in the country without services. If you think it is reasonable to expect that you will drill a water well and it will produce for ever without problems of some kind then I think you are likely better off staying in the city and fighting it out with the zombie hoards.

[SeaGypsy]

I doubt you have ever lived in the country. Rocdoc is right, people in the country are always putting down new bores. Ask a water borer if they are ever short of work. Then ask them how often they hit sweet vs metalic/ acidic/ lime imbalanced water, then ask how often they find man made contaminants.

[WildRose]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'I') doubt you have ever lived in the country. Rocdoc is right, people in the country are always putting down new bores. Ask a water borer if they are ever short of work. Then ask them how often they hit sweet vs metalic/ acidic/ lime imbalanced water, then ask how often they find man made contaminants.

[WildRose]

Also in Alberta, the lady in Rosebud and many others in her area:

http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content ... er-quality